Here's The Most Terrifying Thing About Ebola

As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has spiraled out of control, affecting thousands of Liberians, Sierra Leonians, and Guineans, and threatening thousands more, the world’s reaction has been glacially, lethally slow. Only in the past few weeks have heads of state begun to take serious notice. To date, the virus has killed more than 2,600 people. This is a comparatively small number when measured against much more established diseases such as malaria,HIV/AIDS, influenza, and so on, but several factors about this outbreak have some of the world’s top health professionals gravely concerned:

Its kill rate: In this particular outbreak, a running tabulation suggests that 54 percent of the infected die, though adjusted numbers suggest that the rate is much higher.

Its exponential growth: At this point, the number of people infected is doubling approximately every three weeks, leading some epidemiologists to project between 77,000 and 277,000 cases by the end of 2014.

The gruesomeness with which it kills: by hijacking cells and migrating throughout the body to affect all organs, causing victims to bleed profusely.

The ease with which it is transmitted: through contact with bodily fluids, including sweat, tears, saliva, blood, urine, semen, etc., including objects that have come in contact with bodily fluids (such as bed sheets, clothing, and needles) and corpses.

The threat of mutation: Prominent figures have expressed serious concerns that this disease will go airborne, and there are many other mechanisms through which mutation might make it much more transmissible.

Terrifying as these factors are, it is not clear to me that any of them capture what is truly, horribly tragic about this disease.

I just finished "The Hot Zone," Richard Preston's account of Marburg, Ebola, and Simian Hemorrhagic Fever outbreaks in Germany, Africa, and the United States. This is NOT Y2k, AIDS, swine flu, or bird flu. This is the real deal. People dying of Ebola have ONE BILLION copies of the virus in each cc of blood -- there are TRILLIONS of virions (virus particles) in each dying human, all mutating and all highly infectious. The HIV only infects two types of immune cells; Ebola first infects white blood cells that disable the body’s ability to destroy foreign substances, then it seizes nearly every cell type. Healthy cells literally burst, turning you into a pile of mush. Infected cells that haven’t yet burst carry the virus through the bloodstream to invade different parts of the body like the lymph nodes, spleen and liver. When infected cells attach themselves to the inside of blood vessels, it weakens them, causing fluids to leak.

A potential natural disaster of this magnitude has not has been seen on earth since the Black Plague.

What do you mean, too polite? Peggy Noonan says it’s Obama’s errors in “judgment” that are to blame for the mess we’re in. “Dumbass” is scathing compared with that.

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